Brian Banks was a 16 year old high school football star in Long Beach, California, when a lying girl and the government collaborated to ruin his life. He was falsely accused of rape by classmate Wanetta Gibson after the two had kissed in a stairwell. Gibson concocted an elaborate story claiming that Banks dragged her across campus and raped her. Even though Banks did not commit the crime and in fact there had been no rape at all, his attorney advised him to seek a plea bargain to get a lighter sentence as the government was threatening him with 41 years to life in prison. Choosing what he saw as the lesser of two bad options after his lawyer suggested he would be convicted because he is black, Banks plead “no contest” and was imprisoned for over five years was then put on probation. Upon release, he was forced to wear a GPS monitor, register as a violent sex offender, and was restricted from living near or going near schools.

False accuser Wanetta Gibson is the real rapist (as in financial rape) in this story. She and her family got a large settlement (variously reported as either being $750,000 or $1.5 million) from the Long Beach School District on the basis of her lies and claims that lax school security contributed to causing her “rape”.

Gibson this year admitted Banks did not rape her, but was worried she might have to repay the fraudulently obtained settlement. Students, investigators, and attorneys associated with the California Innocence Project helped to obtain evidence that Gibson had falsely accused Banks which resulted in the overturning of his conviction on May 24, 2012.

Banks was faced with an impossible decision at the time – either fight the charges and risk spending 41 years-to-life in prison, or take a plea deal and spend a little over 5 years of actual prison confinement. Although it would mean destroying his chance to go to college and play football, a lengthy probationary period, and a lifetime of registration as a sex offender, Banks chose the lesser of two evils when he pleaded no contest to the charges.

Teri Stoddard of SAVE (Stop Abusive and Violent Environments) is calling for the prosecution of Wanetta Gibson as part of their effort to quash the epidemic of false allegations of crime and violence that are ruining the lives of many innocent people. She reports that roughly ten percent of Americans have been falsely accused of child abuse, domestic violence, or sexual assault and there are very few protections for such people.

Gibson should be prosecuted for perjury. But that doesn’t go far enough. She should also be prosecuted for criminal fraud that cost taxpayers and insurers an enormous settlement plus legal fees in this case featuring a lying girl and an irresponsible government that encourages more liars to level false allegations by failing to prosecute such crimes.

Significant financial restitution and assistance to Brian Banks and his family is also warranted. It should be paid by the LA County District Attorney, the State of California, and Gibson to Banks and his family.

This boy was placed into prison at the age of 16 years old for 5 years for a rape that did not occur simply because a girl lied against him and the government failed to do its job to determine the truth, instead preferring to bully an innocent child into letting himself be steamrolled by the government because he was male and black and therefore was assumed to be guilty based merely upon a disputed accusation and his race and gender.

Brian Banks is a poster case for the injustices against men and African-American men in particular. If his accuser had been of some other racial group (she is African-American, too), you can get her crime would be the fuse in a powder keg of a potential racial uprising in Los Angeles. There is no doubt that racial bias played a part in the success of the State of California coercing Banks into pleading no contest.

Banks said his defense attorney told him, “‘When you go into that courtroom the jury is going to see a big black teenager and you’re automatically going to be assumed guilty.’ Those are her exact words.”

Many falsely accused people in Los Angeles County have learned the hard way that often the function of a public defender (the lawyer provided by the government to the accused) is to work on behalf of the DA to get a plea bargain using a “no contest” please so the DA can claim a conviction victory while the public defender can “manage” his or her many cases. If you are not rich or politically connected and cannot be paraded about as a “victim” for the government to use to manipulate the public’s opinions, then you are not allowed due process or justice in the United States.

Perhaps these are some of the reasons why the LA District Attorney is resisting prosecuting Gibson. Such a prosecution would draw further media attention to how they collaborated with Gibson in falsely prosecuting and imprisoning Banks and how men and African-American men in particular are routinely denied due process and justice by a government that places more emphasis on punishing somebody severely than on identifying the criminal. The Los Angeles government has a lot to lose here because Los Angeles is known for police brutality and corruption, misconduct in criminal investigations including fabrication of evidence and tampering with witnesses, and terrorizing and tormenting targets of false allegations into pleading “no contest” so that the DA can claim a victory in court. If the general public truly understand how criminal LA’s government is, heads might roll. So it’s better for the DA and government to try to brush this case under the carpet as quickly as possible and trot forth people such as Deputy District Attorney Brentford Ferreira to offer “Justice has been served” as part of the cover-up.

For there to be any semblance of justice, false accusers must be held accountable for their crimes. The penalties for making a false criminal accusation against another person should be at least the same as the penalty associated with the false accusation. However, very few false accusers are ever prosecuted despite causing enormous damage to innocent people. As a result, false accusations are rampant in our society.

The average citizen who knowingly engages in a false accusation resulting in a criminal investigation or prosecution should face double the penalty for the falsely claimed crime. But when it is a government employee who level false accusations at others, the penalty should be even more severe as these people are capable of causing far more damage and should know very well what they are doing is criminal. And when malice can be proven, the penalties should be at least doubled.

The death penalty in general is questionable policy as it is far too often applied to innocent people. But in cases like that of Clyde Ray Spencer, there is plentiful evidence that police officers with personal ties to the case engaged in severely abusive conduct that is so egregious that it warrants a death sentence. Often cases of government abuse feature substantial evidence of malicious wrongful conduct that goes beyond mere circumstance or hearsay statements, and the Spencer case is one of those.

Citizens willingly conspiring with the government to engage in such crimes as false prosecution and subversion of an investigation may also deserve the death sentence. In the Spencer case, Spencer’s ex-wife Shirley Hanson, her police boyfriend Sergeant Michael Davidson, and Detective Sharon Krause all should pay the ultimate penalty for their crimes. But as usual, nothing substantive happened to punish them for their crimes.

In the Banks case, it is not clear the government actually fabricated evidence or tampered with witnesses. It may have simply been a lying girl plus irresponsible and biased prosecutors rather than the apparent criminal conspiracy of the Spencer case. Given this, there must also be penalties for prosecutors who engage in false prosecutions because of negligence or bias. While prosecutors in the Banks case may have believed Gibson, they still had a moral duty to verify her story and to do due diligence prior to proceeding with a prosecution. But many prosecutors and law enforcement officials do not view a fair and impartial investigation to reach the truth as being part of their job duties. On the contrary, they view throwing somebody, anybody, into jail and keeping them locked up for years or having them killed via an act of state-sponsored murder as their central job duties.

There are many other cases in which the prosecutors have ample reason to doubt the guilt of the party they are prosecuting. In such cases, it is common practice to threaten to destroy the person with a long prison term in an effort to force the victim to take a plea bargain exactly like happened to Brian Banks. Prosecutors who engage in this conduct should at a minimum be fired and banned from the practice of law or from any government employment.

If you are an American man and particularly an African-American man, it is quite likely that all that stands in the way between you and a prison cell is the current lack of a false accuser. With the systemic avoidance of prosecution for false accusations and plentiful financial and other incentives (such as advantages in child custody battles) for false reports , we now have an epidemic of innocent people being persecuted for crimes that they did not commit and in many cases which never occurred at all.

Justice is not served by throwing innocent people into prison, nor is it served by rewarding malicious liars who severely and wrongfully harm others. Unfortunately, in today’s United States the operating mantra is “better to throw 100 innocent men in prison than to let one guilty man escape” because the politicians and the government can falsely claim they are “winning the war on crime” when they imprison or kill thousands of innocent people each year. Both the Banks and Spencer cases amply illustrate the results of the current government policies of letting perjury and false accusations go unpunished.

Wanetta Gibson’s mother Wanda Rhodes should also be prosecuted for criminal conspiracy. Reports are that she plotted the false rape allegations to make them a lot of money. Rhodes had a long rap sheet for other crimes including assault with a deadly weapon, burglary, drug offenses, and stalking

Pressure from the Political Elites on prosecutors to obtained a higher percentage of prosecutions for reported rapes has to stop. This has resulted in over zealous ideological prosecutors and a public perception of rape everywhere.

Until people are willing to complain the Elites will be abled to make political hay out of sending young men to jail. This has to stop, we need to complain and the War on Boys has to come to an end. If you are young, black and male; America is a dangerous place.

This is an excellent article and another step along the road to a civilised justice system, well done!

Our justice system is badly flawed, having been the victim of false charge attempts and extortion attempts like this by women and seeing it happen to others I can tell you this is not uncommon. The lack of accountability is one of the problems. Clearly Wanetta Gibson and her mom are career criminals. Yet they are not held accountable.

This article should be called “Railing Against the White System” as it not about the Brian Banks case at all. Very poorly written in regards to subject matter. Whoever “Chris” is they need an education in journalism, they also need to learn to focus on the subject at hand and leave their own passions to the side. Journalism is about the facts, opinionated pieces are called editorials. Mixing these two makes for a confusing read that leaves the reader with sense of having taken nothing away from the reading, like I myself feel right now. I mean what was that whole two and half paragraph jaunt about some case in Washington about. Now I have a few vague ideas about two cases and not even a foggy view of the case in the title. “Chris” is it? First, grow some balls and use your real full name. Second, be “black” on your own time and stop wasting mine with supposed journalism. It’s anger like this that spews out in misguided torrents and makes the rest of us look like ignorant “colords” whinning about injustice just because it involved a black man. Just state a case about injustice and leave race out of it, the further you can prove things without race the more credible the case becomes. Why you ask? Because true injustice does not need your passion involved to inspire others, it can do that on it’s own.